


Inner Peace

by onepieceofharry



Category: Naruto
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, BAMF Haruno Sakura, Gen, Haruno Sakura-centric
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2021-03-05
Updated: 2021-03-05
Packaged: 2021-03-18 12:08:29
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,734
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29857857
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/onepieceofharry/pseuds/onepieceofharry
Summary: After the chunin exams Sakura resolves to demand better lessons from her sensei, only to stumble across a battle between three jounin and two akastuki members that she was vastly underqualified to deal with.Until she accidentally kills Uchiha Itachi.
Comments: 22
Kudos: 226





	Inner Peace

**Author's Note:**

> lol ive had this idea for a while and rewatching naruto has awakened it again um.  
> Anyways "inner" sakura is a new mutation of kekkai genkai and it makes Sakura um. Impervious to genjustu. And also a lil something extra.

There was no special reason why she’d chosen today.

Well, that wasn’t all the way true. Sakura had spent weeks agonizing over what she’d seen, weeks of being by peoples bedside and praying for swift recoveries all around. Weeks of feeling helpless and hopeless and, most horrible of all, insignificant. It was a horrible feeling, and the guilt clawed her up inside. How could she feel, what, envious of the boys she fretted over daily? They’d had to be hospitalized. Lee might never recover, and she had the audacity to feel jealous?

…But they were so strong, so capable and competent in the same way she’d always prided herself being, but obviously wasn’t. It was a schism in her identity, a fracture where she thought she was whole.

The way to repair that schism was clear though: become a better ninja. She just had to work up the courage to ask Kakashi-sensei for more training and, well, shamefully that courage was hard to muster. After all, what if he said no? If he was too busy with her teammates, so far ahead than her that to train her would feel like regressing? 

Maybe it was a sort of fate that she’d woken up that day with enough fire in her belly to finally ask her sensei, no, demand of her sensei better training. Maybe she was just unlucky. Either way, she’d scoured the village looking for the man until she came across a disgruntled Sasuke, informing her that Kakashi had ditched him at lunch to chase after Kurenai and Asuma for whatever reason and vaguely gestured to the direction he’d run off to. Sakura had bowed in thanks, playing with the idea of maybe seeing if he’d like to have lunch with _her_ instead before deciding the timing wasn’t right. She had to ask Kakashi-sensei before she lost her nerve.

The second she looked into those red eyes, her nerve was gone. A shrivelled, sad thing completely dead in front of the man who could be Sasuke’s older clone. His brother.

“Close your eyes, Sakura!” her sensei yelled, the panic in his voice real enough to have her almost lose her breakfast but she was slow, always so goddamn slow and before she could even think about following her sensei’s orders she was pinned in place by those horrible, horrible red eyes. Maybe the sentiment in her sensei’s voice made her a target, or maybe the jutsu just demanded to be cast and she was the only one stupid enough to still have her eyes open, but either way Uchiha Itachi decided his next step was to trap her in the genjutsu meant for a jounin years her senior and much better equipped to handle it.

(Maybe it’s because he knew she was Sasuke’s teammate. Maybe he just wanted to torture him through her. Maybe he just thought a broken genin would take precedent over stopping a missing-nin in the minds of leaf shinobi. Or maybe he wasn’t thinking.)

Sakura had an idea what hell looked like, images conjured through myths trickled through her childhood. It was always dark, and either uncomfortably hot or cold. And there was pain, an endless river of pain built into the very soil that would never falter in it’s duty to bring misery to those unfortunate enough to end up in the cruel world below. 

This was worse.

Everything was inverted, the sky sinking into soil and the earth above her head. Colour was meaningless, acting only as contrasting shapes she couldn’t name or recognize. Vertigo was the defining feature of her surroundings, an inescapable wrongness that filled her senses like an attack. She recoiled with a cry, only to realize she had a body to recoil in. A body brutally hanging on a mounted cross without an inch of escape. Mounted in front of the perverse version of Sasuke with his red eyes and a massive sword aimed at her abdomen.

“Sorry,” the man said, nothing in his voice emoting, “but I’ll make this quick in an effort to avert irreprable mental damage.”

The sword stabbed into her gut and Sakura choked, her first scream tearing out of her throat like an animal’s cry. Tears immediately gushed from her eyes, her body hunched over around the wound and the sword sticking out of it as best she could, instinct to alleviate pain that wouldn’t ever work.

“Only two hours,” Itachi said. “It’s the best I can do.”

Another sword, another body, another scream. _Genjutsu_. She’d realized too slowly as usual, but finally had enough cognitive thought to focus her chakra in a desperate _kai!_

“I’m sorry, little genin,” Itachi intoned, stabbing her with clinical detachment. “That’s not going to work.”

Her scream turned into a wail and then a sob, the pain and misery and futility of her situation grating on her mind in a new way. She’d felt helpless, felt like a burden who couldn’t defend herself _which is why she came to Kakashi-sensei today_. It wasn’t fair that she had to suffer this, that she had to be well and truly trapped like she’d never been in her life when she already knew! She already knew her faults and she’d tried to take steps to change them but this was what happened? A knock-off version of her crush fucking _stabbing_ her until he decided she’d had enough? A world turned inside out just for her, a civilian genin whose only crime was being too hesitant to just ask her sensei day one for better training?

“SHANNARO!”

Sakura tensed, her misery still leaking from her eyes and blood down her dress, but she raised her head anyways at the sound of her own voice. There, at the edge of faulty horizon was, well, her. An ghostly outline of Sakura with teeth barred and fists raised, stomping over to them with a trail of white fire behind her. With every step she seemed to grow, the outline getting bigger and bigger until she scrapped the top of the imagined sky and her hand as big as the hokage building, a hand currently slapping down on top of Sakura and her torturer.

“GET OUT!”

Suddenly, she was free. Still staring into those awful red eyes but in a world with colour and dimension and no thousand swords ripping open her abdomen. She was where she’d been before that man had closed in on her, standing on the shore next to the river of their fight because she didn’t know how to water-walk yet because she was a bad ninja. Easy pickings. That man had appeared just a scant breath in front of her without a care and consumed her, those red eyes so sure of their ability to destroy her.

They were wide now.

She understood why when a ghostly hand appeared in her periphery, growing from her like her own hand would but stretching further, snaking out with angry speed as Itachi tried to step back. The hand disappeared into Itachi’s head, floating through his skin harmlessly just like a genuine ghost would. In the next second, the flat palm completely evaporated into the skull of the man and left only the wrist connected to the arm that wasn’t hers but _was_. That wrist tensed, tendons rising from the inside of it’s forearm and the bicep a little further up the arm contracted. Though she couldn’t see it, Sakura felt the ghost make a fist in Itachi’s head, and a wet sound so horrifying and absolute resounded into the air, blood squirting from the man’s ears.

“AND STAY OUT!”

Sakura gasped, the sound of gushing water from the river next to her finally finding purchase in her mind as well as he heavy breathing. Heaving breathing.

The body across from her collapsed, but so did Sakura, falling to her hands and knees and vomiting bile and breakfast at once. She suddenly felt weak, both a reaction to her sick and the all-too-familiar feeling of chakra exhaustion, though she hadn’t made a single hand sign.

She’d killed an S-class Konoha missing-nin without a single hand sign.

Big hands grabbed her shoulders and Sakura almost stabbed the nin they were attached to until Kakashi-sensei shushed her, pulling her to his side with so much care and consideration that only then did she realize she was crying. She fell into his lap with ill-grace, curling her face into his gut and hiding away from what she’d just done.

“It’s okay, Sakura-chan,” he whispered, hands rubbing her back. “It’s over.”

All at once a new fear struck her, a consequence she could map out and trace the end to and that she had put a stop to _right that second._

She wrenched herself away, desperate eyes finding two different shades of pupils on her sensei. “Don’t tell Sasuke.”

His hand froze on her back. “He deserves to know the man he’d been hunting is dead, Sakura. He needs to know his brother is gone.”

Sakura shook her head furiously, clenching her fists into her sensei’s jounin jacket. “Tell him he died, just don’t tell him it was me.”

He watched her, and she found herself shaking at the newly-familiar glint of red in his right eye. She flinched as he raised a hand, but he only settled his headband back in it’s usual space. She almost immediately felt better.

“Sakura…”

“He’ll kill me,” she hissed, pounding her weak fists into Kakashi’s vest. 

He seemed taken aback by the declaration. “Why..?”

“ _He’ll kill me,_ ” she said again. “I know he will. Don’t tell him.” Her heart pounded loudly, and suddenly all the begging she hadn’t had the frame of mind to ask of Itachi was spilling out of her lips. “Please don’t tell him. Dear _God_ , please don’t tell him it was me Kakashi-sensei. How he’s like with Naruto, how he’s like around anyone else stronger than him, how he was getting stronger only to kill his brother- it was his _dream_ Kakashi-sensei and I took it away and I don’t know how-!”

“Okay.”

Sakura swallowed, blearily looking up at her sensei.

He watched her seriously, sincerity oozing from the only eye he had to express with. “I won’t tell, Sakura-chan. Everything is alright.”

She realized then that she trusted her sensei fully, because his word alone was enough for her to collapse into exhaustion and her mind to finally go dark.


End file.
